


Acts of Charity

by Cheloya



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-10-27 06:49:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10803972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheloya/pseuds/Cheloya
Summary: Old, imported. Watanuki is a giving person.





	Acts of Charity

“When the shop is _mine_ ,” Watanuki growls, and his footsteps thump all along the hall and into the kitchen and all the way back again, and she can hear his voice all the way, which is impressive in a growl, “I will not force my _poor, much-abused employees to go out in ridiculous clothes and count flower petals, **for any reason** , regardless of what hitsuzen has to say about it._”  
  
She laughs at him over the rim of her glass and tells him she isn’t running a charity operation, and when her shop is his, he will run it in exactly the same way she does, and besides, the pinafore had looked lovely, especially with the hat, don’t you agree, Doumeki-kun?  
  
Doumeki (who is beginning to get the hang of this) weighs his options and tells her to leave him out of it, which is probably his best bet in this situation. Or would be, if Watanuki was not Watanuki.  
  
“Huh!” Watanuki says, and there is something wrong with the intonation, there. “Huh! Well, you can just leave me out of it, too, then!” And he storms out of the room and this time they can only hear his feet. Doumeki and Yuuko stare at each other across the table and Yuuko’s first word is a cheerful, unapologetic ‘oops’.  
  
Doumeki’s first word is ‘I’, but the rest of the sentence is ‘think I understand why he tells me he hates you all the time’.  
  
-  
  
Frankly. “Would it help if I told you I liked the hat?”  
  
Sounds of choking. “ _NO._ ”  
  
-  
  
Yuuko takes a page out of his notebook and a pen out of his pencilcase and tells him this is going to be a perfectly normal list of the major things that will happen to him this week. This is to show him, she says, how inevitable hitsuzen really is, because they were going to be on jobs he would have, but now they are going to happen anyway, because she is leaving him out of things.  
  
Watanuki wonders, sourly, what the price is going to be, but she doesn’t mention one, and she folds the note and puts it in his pocket.  
  
“No peeking,” she reminds him sweetly as he leaves for the night, and he glares at her – _as if he would._  
  
That week Watanuki spends three hours trapped in an elevator with Doumeki – who is remarkably persistent about the hat – when he tries to return a letter he found in the street.  
  
A ghostly hand in a park chases him into a wisteria tree, where he waits until nearly midnight while more grasping fingers sprout from the earth and wishes he had a cell phone until Doumeki finds him and drops ofuda carefully onto each outstretched hand; he carries Watanuki for the whole thirty seconds that the smaller boy’s fear of the hands outweighs his fear of being seen being carried through a park by another boy in the middle of the night.  
  
And when he runs into Kudou-kun at the supermarket looking for cake ingredients, he invites the older boy to dinner, since he has a good recipe and it’s easier to learn to cook if you have another person with you. And Doumeki turns up, and Himura-kun (who Kudou-kun complains about, but secretly likes a lot, Watanuki suspects, because he made sure to give the darker boy a strawberry when he didn’t even ask for it) calls halfway through, and they end up eating dinner all crammed together in Watanuki’s little apartment and it almost feels like family again until he’s left alone with the dishes.  
  
The note sits in his pocket on every one of those days, and when the end of the week comes, Yuuko calls him (mourning loudly about a lost week of Watanuki-kun’s wonderful cooking) he walks to the shop _without_ Doumeki, because how dare that bastard leave without even offering to help clean up, and when Yuuko’s stomach is catered for, they sit down to read the note together.  
  
Watanuki is horrified to discover that the note reads:  
  
 _1\. Deliver Souma-san’s letter to Ootori-san._  
  
2\. Purify Nijima Park.  
  
3\. Prevent a terrible accident at Green Drugstore.  
  
He protests. “Kudou-kun isn’t that bad a cook—” and Yuuko smiles and stirs her pipe through the air, thoughtfully.  
  
“Oh, he wouldn’t be cooking,” she tells him lightly. “He had a job in Nijima Park later that night, to deliver a special gift to an angel and a demon. But without you, he would have encountered what you did, and unfortunately neither he nor Himura-kun have the power to remove threats like that.”  
  
Watanuki swallowed. “So the accident wouldn’t have been at Green Drugstore at all,” he continued, valiantly, and Yuuko’s smile darkened slightly.  
  
“You’ve never seen Himura-kun lose his temper, have you?” she mused, and Watanuki decided that it was about time to get her a refill.  
  
“Don’t leave me out of it,” he told her on his return, and she shook her head at him.  
  
“Watanuki-kun,” she admonished. “It wouldn’t matter either way.”  
  
-  
  
Warily. “So you liked the hat.”  
  
“Mmm.”  
  
“And the price is that I know you like the hat.”  
  
“Mmm.”  
  
“And that I... look, I’m not—I’m not going to wear it, all right? Stop looking like that.” A pause. “Listen, you already got to, to, to _carry_ me this week, I think that—”  
  
“Mmm.” Far more enthusiastic. “And your price can be to wear the hat.”


End file.
